The Ralstons

by F. Marion Crawford

He was not in any sense an ordinary being, nor one to be judged by ordinary standards, though he rarely claimed the right to be treated as an exception. The difference between him and the average man lay not in any very unusual gifts, and many might have been found who, knowing him well, would have denied that there was any radical difference at all. He would certainly have taken little pains to persuade these of the contrary. Outwardly, he was a man of letters who had met with considerable success in his career—about as much as justifies good-natured people in making a lion of an author or an artist, but no more. He had written many books, and had learned his business in the bitter struggles which attend the commencement of an average literary man’s life, when the fight for bare existence forces the slender talent to bear burdens too heavy for its narrow shoulders, along paths not easy to tread for those most sure of foot. He had some valuable gifts, however, which had stood him in good stead. He possessed almost incredible physical strength in certain ways, without the heavy, sanguine temperament which requires regular exercise and perpetual nourishment. His endurance was beyond all comparison greater than that of men usually considered very strong, and he had been able to bear the strain of excessive labour which would have killed or paralyzed most people. That was one of the secrets of his success. Secondly, he had acquired an unusual mechanical facility in the handling of language and the arrangement of the matter he produced, so as to give it the most favourable appearance possible. His imagination was not abundant, but he did the best he could with it under all circumstances, and answered all critics with the unassailable statement that he wrote for a living and did the best he could, and sincerely regretted that he was not Walter Scott, nor Goethe, nor Thackeray, nor any of the great ones. That was his misfortune, and not his fault. People flattered him, he said, by telling him that he could do better if he tried. It was not true. He could not do better.

But in all these points he did not differ very widely from the average man who attains to a certain permanent and generally admitted success by driving his faculties to their utmost in the struggle for a living. The chief difference between him and other men had been produced by an experience of life under varying circumstances, such as an ordinary individual rarely gets, and possibly by the long-continued action of unusual emotions with which this study, or history, of Katharine Lauderdale can have nothing to do, and which did not directly concern his literary career nor his relations with the world at large, though the outward result was to make unthinking people say that there was something mysterious about him, which either attracted them or repelled them, according to their temperaments and tastes. At all events, his life had tended to the creation of a form of belief and a mode of judgment which seemed very simple to himself, and perfectly incomprehensible to almost every one else. He showed other people fragments and bits of it, when he was in the humour, and sometimes seemed surprised that those who heard him should not also understand him. One of his fundamental articles of faith seemed to be that life as a possession was of no value whatsoever: a doctrine which attracted very few. But those who knew him and watched him were sure that there was no affectation in that part of his creed, though they might hesitate in finding reasons for his belief in it. It was strongly contrasted with his immovable faith—not in a life to come, for he despised the expression—but in the present fact of immortality. The mere fact that he laughed at the idea of ‘past’ and ‘future’ in their relation to the soul, sufficiently confused most of those who had heard him talk of such things.

Katharine Lauderdale had neither the man’s experience to help her in following him, nor any superior genius of insight to lead her to his conclusions by what one might call the shorthand of reason—intuition. She was simply attracted without understanding, as so many people are nowadays, by everything which promises a glimpse at the unknown, if not a knowledge of the unknowable. She took the longing for the power of comprehension, the fragments for the whole, and the crumbs for the bread of life. It was not unnatural, considering the tendencies of modern culture, but it was unfortunate.

She halved her soul, and gave John Ralston his share of it, though he had a very good one of his own. She elaborated a theory of interchangeable and interdependent selves for herself and him, which momentarily satisfied all her wants. She took his self with her own into the temple of love, and bade it bow down and worship with her the glorious deification of human passion which she had set up there. And his imaginary self, being really but that part of her own being which she called his, consented and obeyed, and did as she did. And the incense rose before the shrine, and the love-angels chanted love’s litany of praise, while Love himself smiled down upon her, and told her that he was immortal, and would make her deathless for her belief in him. The temple was beautiful beyond compare; the deity was spotless, fair of form, and noble of feature; the heart that worshipped was fresh, unsullied, and sincere. There had never been anything more perfect than it all was in Katharine’s imagination; and there could never, in all the long life that was before her, be anything so perfect again. John Ralston, single-hearted and deeply loving as he was, could never have any conception of the divinity his maiden wife adored in secret. Her instinct told her that though he was with her, the manliness in him looked at the world from another point of view; and in all their many exchanges of thought she never spoke of her visions of blessedness. The fact that she kept them to herself gave them more strength, and preserved their intact beauty in all its splendid strength and all its infinite delicacy.

In a certain way she owed to Paul Griggs some of her sweetest and most exquisite thoughts, of which the memory must be with her all her life, long after the humanity of truth supplanted the dignity of the ideal. Not that he had taught her anything of what he believed and thought that he knew. She, like the rest, had received only fragments of his meaning; but out of them she had constructed a whole which was beautiful in itself, if nothing else—as lovers of art have dreamed an unbroken ideal of perfection upon bits of marble unearthed from the grave of a great thing destroyed, moulding theories upon it, and satisfying their tastes through it, each in his own way, though perhaps all very far from what was once the truth.

But, on the other hand, Griggs was partly responsible for the eclipse of what, in her nature, as in all, was essentially necessary. She did not at the present time feel the loss, if it were really a loss, and not a mere temporary shutting off of all higher possibilities from her mental sight. She did not, perhaps, fully realize the distance to which she had gone in unbelief in substituting one ideal for another; and she would have been profoundly shocked had any one told her that she had at the present time wholly abandoned anything approaching to a form of Christianity. She would have reasoned that she said prayers, as she supposed other people did; but she would have found it hard to say what she thought when she said them. Nine-tenths of them were for John Ralston, and were in reality addressed to the divinity in the love temple—the remaining ones were mere words, and said in a perfunctory way, with a sort of sincerity of manner, but with no devotion whatever, and no attempt to strengthen them with a belief that they might be answered. She had been taught to say them, and continued to say them with the conscientiousness which is born of habit, before there can be any thought connected with the thing done.

Griggs and his talk had only contributed to this result. The quick and noiseless destruction of Katharine’s beliefs had been chiefly brought about by the actions of the persons with whom she had to do, and by the collapse of their principles in the face of difficulties, temptations and tests. It was natural that she should ask herself of what use her father’s blind faith and rigid practice could be, when neither the one nor the other could diminish his avarice nor check his cruelty when anything or any one stood between him and money. She was not to be blamed if she doubted the efficacy of the true faith, when she saw her religious mother half mad with envy of her own daughter’s youth and beauty. As for the rest of them all, they did not pretend to be religious people. Their misdeeds killed her faith in human nature, which is, perhaps, the ordinary key to that state of mind which believes in God, though it is by no means the only one.

Had she been able to discern and analyze what was going on in her own heart, she would have seen that her difficulty was the old one. The existence of evil in the world disproved to her the existence of a Supreme Power which was all good. But she neither analyzed nor discerned. It was sufficient for her that the earthly evil facts existed to assure her that the heavenly, transcendent Power was an impossibility. She never made the statement to herself, but she unconsciously took it for granted in substituting one divinity for the other. John Ralston said that he ‘believed in things’—and did, vaguely. But she had never found it possible to bring him to any concise statement of what his beliefs were. And yet he was, in her loving opinion, by far the morally best of all the men and women she had ever known. He did not go to church every Sunday, as her father did. She believed that he never went to church at all, in fact. But there was no denying the superiority of a man who had bravely overcome such temptation as John Ralston had formerly had to deal with, over one who, like her father, believed, trembled, and nevertheless gave himself up wholly to his evil passion.

So she had lost her belief in human nature. But as she could not afford to lose her belief in the man she loved, she had taken him out of the rest of humanity, and made him the half of herself, so that they two stood quite alone in the world, and had their temple to themselves, and their little god to themselves, and their faith and belief and religious practice altogether to themselves, though John Ralston was quite ignorant of the fact. But that made no difference to Katharine. He was in her earthly paradise, though he did not know it, and was as sincere a worshipper of the divinity as she herself.

In this way she excepted both him and her from common humanity, and was sure that she had found the true path which leads to the fields of the blessed. Love was the centre of hope and the circumference of life; it was the air she breathed, the thoughts she thought, and the actions she performed. There was nothing else. And since eternity was the present, as Griggs said, there was no hereafter, and so there could never be anything but love, even after men ceased to count time. In the midst of the prosaic surroundings of a society life, as in the midst of the great and evil passions which do devilish deeds just below the calm, luxurious and dull surface, there was one true idealist, one maiden soul that dreamed of love’s immortality, and placed hers in love’s heart of hearts.